SAN JOSE — Weeks ago neighbors in a west San Jose community first heard the coyotes howling. They saw them cavorting in their yards.

Then one found the gruesome corpse of a neighbor’s cat on the front lawn.

“It just had fur left on its paws, and its guts were ripped out,” Tina Brown said of her discovery on a recent Saturday morning. “My husband thought kids had killed it.”

But Brown, who lives on Vanderbilt Drive near Forest Hill Elementary School, wasn’t so sure. She quickly did some research and realized coyotes likely killed the cat.

Brown promptly told her neighbors, Paul and Jennifer Flattery, that Simba, their 15-year-old American short hair, had been killed.

“The whole family was quite upset,” Paul Flattery said. “We buried Simba in our backyard, at least what was left of him.”

A week before Simba’s death, Delia Gee, who lives a few blocks from the Flatterys, had heard and seen the coyotes howling in her front yard. Gee told the Flatterys that her cat had been killed by one.

“Within a week or so of hearing that story, Simba was eaten,” Paul Flattery said.

Distraught, the family contacted their local wildlife authorities and were told the coyotes could not be relocated from their neighborhood.

Jen Costantin, the outreach and education director of the Wildlife Center of Silicon Valley, says that according to laws set in place by the California Department of Fish and Game, coyotes cannot legally be trapped or relocated unless they are sick, injured or orphaned.

“There are laws in the state against relocating wildlife,” she said. “We don’t believe trapping and relocating them is something that’s available.”

But for Paul Flattery, the laws don’t make sense.

“Simba had been around a long time, and he was a very close part of our family,” he said. “Part of our frustration is that no one seems to care when cats are being killed, but what they don’t realize is that how much that cat meant to the handful of people that owned him.”

Camilla Fox, founder and executive director of the Coyote Project, a national organization that promotes coexistence between coyotes and humans, says that although coyotes can’t be relocated, there are steps families can take to protect their pets and property.

“Learning to coexist with coyotes is a communitywide effort that requires that people take responsibility to mitigate or to remove coyote attractants” such as fallen fruit, water sources and open trash containers, she said. “We share the environment with wild animals and that necessitates that we remove attractants around our homes, and that we protect our domestic animals from coyotes and other predators.”

While the Browns and Flatterys currently own small dogs, the Gees have a second cat. All three families are worried about the well-being of their pets and have been keeping them indoors to prevent further attacks.

Flattery worries there are even greater risks involved with coyotes roaming their streets.

“They’re out there looking for things they can eat, and they’re doing a good job of it,” he said. “I truly believe that if a toddler was out at night, my neighborhood would be a horrible place for it to be.”

Even though Brown and Flattery would like the coyotes to be moved elsewhere, Brown concedes that simply relocating them won’t solve the overriding problem.

“People need to be made aware of this, and we are hoping for a way to get them away,” Brown said. “In my opinion they need to be caught and moved way up into the hills, although if they do they’ll just come back.”

For information about how to protect your pets and property from coyotes and other wildlife, visit www.dfg.ca.gov.